Academic Roger Scruton has been fired as a government housing adviser after an interview in which he claimed George Soros had an "empire" in Hungary and that the word Islamophobia was "invented".
"Anybody who doesn’t think that there’s a Soros empire in Hungary has not observed the facts," Prof Scruton told the New Statesman, in a manner the magazine called "heedless of the antisemitic portrayal of the philanthropist George Soros as a Jewish puppet-master".
Prof Scruton, who chaired the Government's commission meant to drive house-building, also said the word Islamophobia was "invented by the Muslim Brotherhood in order to stop discussion" and said it was "very frightening" how "each Chinese person is a kind of replica of the next one".
Within hours of the interview being published on Wednesday, the government confirmed Prof Scruton had been dismissed from his part-time role.